Update 12/30/09: Turns out I have to eat a little crow on part of this post: Only hours after writing this, Netflix coughed up a purchase order for TAINTLIGHT at long last, so thanks to everyone who put it in their queue it should be available to rent there shortly after the New Year. Still no word one way or another re: COCKHAMMER, though… 😉

Hard to believe, but in just a couple of days, 2009 will be a distant memory. Seems like only yesterday that I was writing a blog about how much 2008 sucked and how I was looking forward to what 2009 would bring. And bring it did!Read the rest of this entry »

As I mentioned in a few other posts, the wife and I have been expecting a baby and last Thursday, January 29, 2009 at 3:33 am, he arrived! Benjamin Robert Bookwalter popped out a healthy 7 lbs. 8 ozs., 21″ tall after 18 hours of labor. Of course, he decided it was time to come on one of the worst days of an Ohio winter! But he was delivered without incident and both baby and mommy are doing well.

It goes without saying that his birth is one of the proudest moments of my life… it’s truly amazing to stand there and watch his birth and immediately see how it dwarfs all of my other accomplishments in life.

Thanks to my family & friends who have shared in the experience… I’ll try not to be one of those annoying parents who goes on and on about his kid in my blog… after 42 years being baby-free, I know how grating that can be!

I can’t recall wanting a year to end as much as I did 2008! I mean, did that year just suck ass or what?!

I should have known what the year would hold for me… I spent New Year’s Day evening emptying the contents of my stomach outside of an Applebee’s in Niagara Falls, Canada. (Can’t blame the food here… I had a bug on the drive up there and I could barely eat soup. It was some kind of stomach flu, and it wouldn’t be my first bout of it in 2008). I take things like that as a bad omen.Read the rest of this entry »

September 19th, 2008
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Comments Off on The Kremlin tries to poison American tourist with food!
Posted by J.R. Bookwalter under Family, Random Thoughts, Travel

OK, not really… especially since I was visiting Ukraine and not Russia. But I did suffer a pretty nasty bout of food poisoning last week while visiting the wife’s family in Kakhovka, Ukraine. We took a side trip for a few days to Yalta, a resort town on the Black Sea in the Crimea territory and I spent the first night emptying the contents of my stomach from both ends for literally a 12-hour stretch of the first night. (The photo above was taken well after I recovered, and no, I didn’t eat that whole plate of food.)Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been a freelance kind of guy by trade since quitting the Art Institute of Pittsburgh in July, 1985 at the beginning of my second year. The stroke of luck that landed me with the deal for my first film, THE DEAD NEXT DOOR, has continued more or less for 23 years to varying degrees. Never rich but not quite poor, I’ve essentially accomplished what I set out to do more than two decades ago, which is to get by doing what I love. I never wanted to be famous and I never wanted to be rich. Ask and ye shall receive! 😉Read the rest of this entry »

Long story short… when I was a kid I found this little town called Bookwalter, Ohio in an old road atlas. Situated in the “devil’s triangle” of Columbus, Dayton and Cincinnati, I often wondered just how small it was. My grandfather, a truck driver, once told me that he went through the tiny town and stopped to talk to some of the residents.Read the rest of this entry »